The Radical Possibility of the Women’s March

The crowds on Saturday were so enormous, so radiant with love and dissent, that a broader alignment seemed possible.

PHOTOGRAPH BY PARI DUKOVIC FOR THE NEW YORKER

On Saturday, a constellation of woman-centered, anti-Trump protest lit up across all seven continents. (A group on an expedition ship in Antarctica adopted the unofficial slogan “Penguins for Peace.”) At the center of the action was the Women’s March on Washington, which drew an estimated half a million participants. There were men and women of all origins and orientations, a teeming parade of pink hats and protest signs that brightened against a pale silver fog blanketing the sky. There were sensible moms and crust punks, bros in Patagonia and toddlers on shoulders. A group of Gen Xers from Pittsburgh kept yelling, “Go Steelers!” A great-grandmother leaned on a walker, ambling gamely down the National Mall with clouds of cotton in her ears.

Before Saturday, there had been some fuss about the conceptual nature of a “women’s march.” Inside the movement, some women worried that other women would be given unfair priority; outside of it, some men sulked, apparently desiring to be addressed directly at all times. But it made sense to organize the first major post-Inauguration protest march around women, who are almost fifty-one per cent of the American population, who have been maligned and attacked by the new President, and who make up a group within which every other vulnerable population exists. The Women’s March protesters took an obvious, gentle pleasure in sharing space with people of divergent interests and appearances. There must have been a thousand shared apple slices at the demonstration, and, remarkably, not a single arrest by D.C. police. (At a Black Lives Matter demonstration, you probably would have seen many police officers, but on Saturday the presence of law enforcement felt minimal, which likely helped to keep the protest as peaceful as it was.)

There was, naturally, some raunch at the march against the pussy-grabbing President: one young woman, for instance, wore a fully articulated stuffed vulva on her back, complete with a plush clitoris and the label “Can’t Touch This." But the heavy presence of first-time protesters insured a certain softness. A nine-year-old girl with hair the color of gingerbread carried a sign that read, “I’m a Kid and This Cannot Be My Future.” Her name was Frankie, and she thought the protest was “just sort of amazing—all these people, from all around the world, coming together to help women.” A few feet away from her stood Betsy and Nancy, resplendent in Rosie the Riveter gear. They were on either side of age sixty, and had taken an eleven-hour bus the previous day from the small town of Canton, in upstate New York. A D.C. church had welcomed their delegation of Unitarians; it was Betsy and Nancy’s first protest, too. “Trump is the antithesis of everything I believe in,” Betsy said. “Wilderness, women’s freedom, public schools.”

PHOTOGRAPH BY PARI DUKOVIC FOR THE NEW YORKER

Someone who’d been looking at Twitter announced that Gloria Steinem was speaking—then Scarlett Johansson, then Janelle Monáe. There was a long procession of A-list speakers, but no one anywhere near me could hear or see them. It wasn’t noon yet, but the crowd was already large beyond reckoning, and there was no loudspeaker system or signage to suggest where else people might go.

So I wandered the mall, taking a running sign taxonomy. There were the signs that announced the carrier’s identity: “Fornicating Homosexual Abortionist,” “Now You’ve Gone and Pissed Off Grandma,” “Proud Louisiana Liberal—Send Help!” (Plenty of people carried torches for others: white and Asian women holding Black Lives Matter signs, men with signs about reproductive rights.) Others roasted Donald Trump lightheartedly: “The Devil Wears Bronzer,” “Urine For a Long Four Years.” Some were as frank as possible: “I’m Too Worried to Be Funny,” “I Can’t Believe I Left the Soviet Union for This Shit.” There were pleas for police accountability and grace toward immigrants; innumerable signs protested Trump’s Cabinet, his unreleased tax returns, his “Access Hollywood” gloating descriptions of sexual assault. Coat-hanger cutouts were everywhere.

In an area bounded by port-a-potties, a group of protesters clustered under the trees. Four women in their late fifties carried signs for the United Steelworkers; they worked in paper mills in New England. “We’re afraid of losing everything the labor movement stands for,” Wanda, fifty-five, with dark skin and shoulder-length twists, said. “Benefits, safety, health. Wages going up for everyone, not just people in the union.”

Marilyn, sixty-seven, wore a pastel sweater. She was from York, Pennsylvania. She told me that she’d been depressed since the election. “But you have to stand up for what you believe in! I was teargassed in Dupont Circle protesting the Vietnam War!” Her husband, Keith, who’s active in the climate-change movement, carried a sign that said, “I’m Marching for My Grandchildren.” Around the message, there were nine names, written in colorful lettering, for kids aged eight months to ten.

Near them, a man with gray hair and crooked teeth held a sign that said, “Try Grabbing These Pussies, Motherfucker!” His name was Martin, and he was seventy-four. “Look at this turnout,” he said. “At the antiwar protests in the last decade, there were so many old farts like me. This is something else—like being in the sixties again.” On cue, a man wearing a poncho and a sign that said “Criminalize Toxic Masculinity” breezed by us, smoking weed.

The march itself was supposed to begin at 1 P.M., and the crowd packed in close, awaiting orders. A midday lull set in, and lasted for more than an hour. Cell-phone service flickered in and out; people hummed “This Land Is Your Land” and checked the Women’s March Twitter account for instructions. A chant kept erupting and dying: “Let’s march now! Let’s march now!” The news arrived first from the Associated Press: the enormous crowd had choked the planned route to a standstill.

I went over to talk to a tough-looking man wearing mirrored aviators and a bucket hat. He carried an American-flag sign that said, “Protest Is Patriotic.” His hot-pink shirt read, “Walked Point in Vietnam to Defend Democracy in 1970, Walked the Mall in Washington to Defend Democracy in 2017.” It was his first-ever protest. “The thing I’m here for is that a lot of people have died for the right to do what we have done today,” he said. At that, a sudden crush of people yanked me backward into the crowd.

The mass was herding itself across the Mall, toward Pennsylvania Avenue and the White House. Women kept yelling out things that felt overly symbolic: “Can someone just please give us some instructions? Can someone just tell us what to do?” As the crowd crept past the Trump International Hotel, booing loudly, the most gleefully disrespectful chants of the day broke out on repeat: “We need a leader, not a creepy tweeter” and “He’s orange, he’s gross, he lost the popular vote.” A woman named Edythe from Detroit yelled, “We tried going high, baby, but we'll get dirty if we have to!” A mother tossed her giggling baby in the air, and a woman behind me said what I was thinking: that she couldn't look at the whole mass of people without tears welling behind her eyes.

Beneath the thrill of the broad-minded demonstration, there was a nagging thought that I couldn’t shake, and that some protesters made a point of noting: if a majority of white women had not voted for Trump in November, he would not currently be President—and millions of people would not be protesting. There’s a corollary to this that also tugged at me: if Trump weren’t President—if we had, on Friday, inaugurated President Hillary Clinton—how many of the white women who protested on Saturday would feel as if there weren’t much about America that needed protesting at all?

The radical possibility of the Women’s March, the hope that hasn't been squashed, is a broad alignment of straight, middle-class white women with all the people who were glad to stand beside them and march: the black and queer and disabled women, the minimum-wage workers and undocumented immigrants, all the people whose rights to self-determination are constantly under threat. The crowds on Saturday were so enormous, so radiant with love and dissent, that this larger coming together seemed possible. As Trump’s Administration proves itself unkind to all but the wealthy, perhaps there is a coalition ready to speak their hearts, to listen, to welcome anyone in.

Jia Tolentino is a staff writer at The New Yorker. Her first book, the essay collection “Trick Mirror,” will be published in August.